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0 pointssimiones4y ago0 comments

This doesn't make any sense. The biggest advantage of consoles over PCs is the fixed hardware, allowing developers to focus on hyper-optimization and bug fixing for all the quirks of that hardware. Not to mention the economies of scale console manufacturers can get when they are building tens or hundreds of millions of devices with the exact same specs.

Of course, Valve can design and release their own console with fixed hardware and they could perhaps out-compete Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft. But a customizable PC, especially one where you can install any Linux-based OS you want, will never be able to destroy the console market.

Not to mention, nothing that Valve has done indicates that they are willing to create a full Console OS, that would hide all of the desktop OS complexity from users and developers: headache free updates where you don't assume the user can just drop to a root shell if something breaks, network config utilities that can be used with a controller, fully standardized drivers, libc, OpenGL/Vulkan version etc.

Not to mention, part of the advantage of consoles is that they offer some amount of trusted computing: the fact that it's mostly impossible for users to install anything on a console is a major advantage even to end-users for Online games, where you have almost 0 problems with cheating compared to PC where it is a constant struggle.

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AltruisticGapHN4y ago

> Of course, Valve can design and release their own console with fixed hardware and they could perhaps out-compete Sony/Nintendo/Microsoft. But a customizable PC, especially one where you can install any Linux-based OS you want, will never be able to destroy the console market.

I don't understand your argument either.

I think it's logical to assume when they already introduced "Steam Deck verified" (cf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL0NIhJpHg0 ) that Valve will release a fixed config, and that developers will be able to finetune their game to run great on it.

Where I follow you is that in theory Valve allows other manufacturers to build a Steam Deck compatible hardware, and hence there may be third party alternatives to their rumored console, which indeed could have perhaps different GPU / CPUs...

In that case first thing comes to mind, is when you hear of all those 30 FPS games on today's consoles.. what are we losing here? Some mythical "console experience"? When consoles today do have all kind of lags and stuttery gameplay since games engines nowadays are more complex than ever? There's basically no downsides.. I mean even Nintendo I was watching someone play a simple game like Animal Crossing and the loading times were so long... where is the mythical console experience? Seems like it's been gone for a long time. Now you get a polished experience, and a platform that (in theory) doesn't crash, and doesn't require you to figure out drivers and whatnot.

Next thing comes to mind is, for those people who are new to PC GAMING, they don't need to touch anything. They are not going to "install any Linux-based OS they want". Why would they do that? That scenario is strictly for the advanced users like us who would already have a capable "gaming PC" and are confident about hacking things.

The cheating part is partially addressed by Valve, they're working with anticheat developers.

Regarding cheating it seems like consoles are no longer a "pristine environment" due to crossplay:

https://www.pcgamer.com/on-behalf-of-pc-gaming-sorry-about-a...

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